I recently started a project with WordPress 4.0 running on an Azure Website with Azure SQL as its back end (to use up Azure credits without needing to use ClearDB MYSQL's offering and costing me money).

This started off well with the Bradoo version of WordPress (http://wordpress.brandoo.pl/project/) which already had the "wp-db-abstraction" plugin in place. Allowing a stock WordPress site to be quickly and easy up and running.

This blog post was written while using Umbraco 7.1.4. I'm new to Umbraco and MVC as a whole, so it took quite a few hours of playing around with customer MVC controllers before finding an easier way to access my existing membership database.

In the main web.config there are two membership providers: UmbracoMembershipProvider is for backoffice authentication while UmbracoMembershipProvider is for the front end. It turns out that replacing the UmbracoMembershipProvider details will let you talk to a different database that uses the good old asp.net 2 membership system, rather than any of the newer versions.